More broadly, a whole series of images — caroling, visiting friends, decorating trees, eating turkey and pumpkin pie, enjoying the holiday with a loved one or alternately begging them to come home, looking in downtown store windows, kissing under the mistletoe, building a snowman, envisioning what Santa might bring (no less than four popular Christmas songs describe creepily anthropomorphic dolls) — are so commonly deployed throughout the Christmas canon that one can barely match them to any specific song. To put it another way, almost every song that gets endless radio airtime around the holidays is constructed out of several of these images and themes.
Those, on the other hand, which diverge from this standard and are no longer widely played now represent a sort of Christmas song evolutionary dead end.
Curiously, Frank Sinatra’s iconic first Christmas album, 1957’s A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra, features only two original songs — “Mistletoe and Holly” and the less forgotten “Christmas Waltz,” which recently received an Amazon Original release. But neither of these songs is played very much today. It’s actually not that easy to write a brand new Christmas song, much less try to swap turkey for pheasant.
Other entries covered familiar ground, but perhaps too much so. Nat King Cole’s “Caroling, Caroling” tries to turn singing carols into the sole point of…a carol. Perry Como’s “There Is No Christmas Like a Home Christmas” sounds a lot like “Home for the Holidays,” but even more saccharine. After all, lots of people don’t go “home” for the holidays, whether because they don’t travel, they host, or their parents are deceased. Trying to make Christmas synonymous with homecoming just doesn’t work thematically.
And “dickory dock”? It’s from Andy Williams’ riff on “Happy Holiday” (from the movie Holiday Inn), which is simply titled “Happy Holiday/The Holiday Season.” It probably gets more airtime than any other song I’ve mentioned, but it’s still singularly odd, as though it were written by someone with no first-hand knowledge of how Americans actually sang or talked about Christmas.
Williams refers to the “Christmas snow,” a term used by nobody else. He sings that Santa will be “coming down the chimney, down.” (I didn’t catch that, did you say “down”?) Santa’s bag of gifts turns into a “big fat pack upon his back.” Williams advises the kiddies to “leave a peppermint stick for old St. Nick,” because this version of Santa doesn’t like milk and cookies. And, of course, he welcomes the holiday season by crying “hoop-de-do and dickory dock.”